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The iCampus alliance is a six-year educational-technology research
alliance between Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). The alliance, established in October 1999, supports and
disseminates faculty initiatives in educational technology, sponsoring
innovations, incubating them through classroom use, and promoting their
adoption, evaluation, and continued evolution both within MIT and
through worldwide multi-institutional cooperation. The initiative is
managed by Microsoft Research’s External Research & Programs group.
Projects
iCampus supports transformative projects whose scope transcends an
individual course and whose impact extends beyond an individual campus.
iCampus is concentrating on three broad areas: The Internet and Web
services for shared educational resources:
- iLabs Remote access to
laboratory instruments and worldwide sharing that can decrease
dramatically the cost of laboratory instruction in science and
engineering. Students in Singapore, Sweden, and Uganda are performing a
lab experiment using equipment located at MIT.
- iMoat Web-based infrastructure for
administering essay examinations, which spreads the cost of providing
high-quality writing assessment across multiple institutions and
stimulates research collaboration in writing instruction.
- DSpace and OpenCourseWare Institutional
repositories for global access to university educational and research
materials.
Active learning alternatives to traditional lectures:
- TEAL Studio-mode instruction that
replaces lectures by small group activities. All lectures in MIT’s
introductory physics subjects have been replaced by studio-mode classes
that build on visualization and simulation technology.
- XTutor Online lectures supported by
computer-based exercises and intelligent tutoring software.
Instructional applications of emerging technologies, including pen-based
interfaces for collaborative design, embedded sensors, and biological
computing.
Instructional applications of emerging technologies:
- Pen-based interfaces
- Speech recognition
- Embedded sensors
- Biological computing
The central theme of this work is twofold: stimulating faculty-led
innovation in educational technology and demonstrating effective models
for dissemination that amplify faculty efforts. Collaboration
Disseminating technology and innovative teaching practices requires a
focus on faculty-to-faculty interaction. iCampus emphasizes the
collaboration necessary to translate innovations developed in one
community to successful new practices in another. This high-touch
approach to outreach engages faculty and seeks institutional commitment
to ensure both scalability and sustainability of adoption. iCampus
projects cultivate an engaged community of faculty to implement, extend
or be inspired to create their own analogs of iCampus software. For
example, iLabs encourages faculty to implement their own experiments
using a shared architecture, a process intended to promote a
micro-barter economy of shareable experiments worldwide. iCampus
collaborations are organized through an international network of hub
institutions that include more than 40 affiliate campuses. Licensing
Based on the approach of the MIT license for free and open-source
software, all iCampus software is distributed under terms that permit
anyone to use, modify, distribute, and redistribute the software,
thereby encouraging creative contributions from all those inspired to
build on iCampus work. This program is managed by
Paul Oka.
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